This last Saturday, I and my brother enjoyed a San Francisco Bay Memorial Cruise on the SS Jeremiah O'Brien. The ship is the last of her kind. Over 2,600 were built, but she is the only one of two in existence today, and the only one in original condition and still able to steam under her own power. Put into service in 1943, she participated in the Normandy invasion as well as serving in the Pacific.
The cruise was to honor those still living and passed who experienced the WWII events the O'Brien partook in. Aboard this Saturday were some of those who did. They are now feeble, yet as they stepped on the decks of the ship as she prepared to set sail they stood proud and remembered the past. Not all the veterans of the era were the Merchant Marines who operated these vessels. They were veterans from various services and eras, some in uniform who sailed on them, others who took passage on ships like her as they went to war. In their eyes and on their faces was the excitement the day knowing they are old, while remembering yesterday when they were but 18-20 year old men who went to far away places fight. Today they were old and young and alive.
About the ship.
There is something about being on a small ship that is hard to understand, The ship is a living breathing thing within you live and your life relies. It is not that the ship has a soul in of herself, but in a sense she does. Her soul is the men that keep her alive, men who are apart of the her, yet apart. The throb of her engines is the heart of the ship which reminds you of how she takes care of you.
As Horace once said about wind powered ships is true of the O'Brien and all ships and the men who serve them: "Surely oak and three-fold brass surrounded his heart who first trusted a frail vessel to the merciless ocean."
These ships had no oak nor brass, the ocean was not their fear, yet fear they did face. Speaking of all the men who went to war in WWII, the merchantmen had the highest casualty rate. One in twenty-six died in the line of duty, and all who served were volunteers, many of who volunteered had been rejected by the other services.
History reminds us of great naval battles that won the war in the Pacific and the Atlantic in WWII. Who cannot remember the battle of Midway, or the Coral Sea, the North Atlantic, and the list goes on. Yet without ships like the O’Brien and the brave men who manned them the war in Europe and the Pacific would have been lost. (The Liberty ships were designed with the knowledge that they, on average, would only survive three voyages).
A personal perspective.
I had the opportunity, and yes, now I see it as an opportunity, to serve on two war ships. One was nuclear powered. Oh, how different was the engine room of the O’Brien with her three cylinder steam engine to the Bainbridge and her powerful reactor and steam turbines. The top speed of the O’Brien is 11 knots, my ship was 40. Yet, as I look back, in reality I was not a reactor operator, I was a boiler-man, the one in control of the fires that made the steam that kept the ship alive. Unlike the boiler men of the O’Brien, I shimmed rods on a nuclear reactor to generate the heat to make the steam that gave Bainbridge her life. In the engine room of the the O'Brien this weekend I saw men with the same charge, but different skills. There in the bowels of the O’Brien, the boiler-men viewed their gauges and the color of the fire that made O’Brien live. A common bound was found. We gave steel life.
On this voyage aboard O'Brien I saw the linkage between two very different worlds from the one I experienced, yet bound with the same purpose, and that was to bring life to the ship and keep all safe within her three-fold brass and surely oak.
Ships are of men, not of wood or steel. Whatever strength a ship has is with her crew, and like the crews of the O'Brien and thousands of others like her, they did it with honor and dedication.
